Monday, May 23, 2016

Only 55 Percent of Russians Who Say They’re Orthodox Believe in God, Surveys Show

Paul
Goble

Staunton, May 23 – Russian Orthodoxy
is more an ethnic marker than a faith for many Russians, given that only 55
percent of those who identify as Orthodox say they believe in God and an
additional 10 percent say they have doubts about His existence, with large
numbers placing their faith in superstitions and even witchcraft, surveys show.

But precisely because Russian
Orthodoxy is more an ethnic rather than a religious identity for many, it has
been far easier for the Moscow Patriarchate to offer itself as the foundation of
the state, to support in many cases a rapprochement with the Soviet past, and
to back the repression of dissent in a manner consistent with the communists.

In this week’s “Argumenti nedeli,”
journalist Denis Terentyev discusses the pretensions of the Moscow Patriarchate
to make Orthodoxy the foundation of Russian national identity and the many
reasons for thinking this “foundation” is anything but the simple and unified
thing its supporters claim (argumenti.ru/toptheme/n539/448944).

The Patriarchate routinely invokes
VTsIOM’s finding that “75 percent of the population of Russia considers itself
to be Orthodox” as the basis for its claims.But such claims need to be examined with care, not only because they
conceal as much as they reveal but because of the hierarchy’s frequent “crude
falsifications” of all kinds.

Polls on the religious affiliation
of the population first began to be conducted at the end of the 1980s,
Terentyev points out. At that time, the sociologists found that from 16 to 19
percent of the population declared themselves to be Christians, Muslims, and
Buddhists, while 70 percent said they were unbelievers.

By 1993, however,
69 percent of Russian men and 82 percent of Russian women declared that they
were believers; and the leaders of the various religions drew on “these
fantastic statistics” to claim that there were 120 million Orthodox and 40
million Muslims, for a total “greater than the 140 million people” in the country.

Lev Gudkov, the director of the Levada
Center polling agency, adds that Russian Orthodoxy is “an ethno-confessional
identity” rather than a faith, with fewer than seven percent of those saying
they are Orthodox in fact observing religious rules, fewer than half attending
services regularly, and only 55 percent of them saying they believe in God.

Moreover, he continues, “25 percent
of the Orthodox believe in magic and witchcraft, and 30 percent believe in
astrology and horoscopes … [and only] about half of the Russian Orthodox have
not opened the Bible, with only a handful able to name all ten of the Commandments.”

Like many in Europe, a large share
of Russians identify with a religion but place no faith in it, surveys
show.And an increasing number who
declare that they are believers do not link themselves to any particular denomination.
In Russia today, such people number 4.2 percent or six million, “more than the
population of St. Petersburg,” Terentyev points out.

Another two million are those who
identify as Orthodox but do not link themselves with either the Russian
Orthodox Church or the Old Believers.Few of them organize into congregations but have views produced by
personal reading and reflection, Russian experts suggest.

Roman Lunkin, a specialist on
religious life at the Moscow Institute of Europe, says that his survey found
that only five percent of Russians polled are part of a specific congregation
and regularly attend church.“Experts
have known about these figures for a long time, but they are consistently
ignored by politicians and church hierarchs,” he adds.

Others have made similar points. An
article in “Moskovsky komsomolets” yesterday, for example, suggests that
superstition, not religion, is overwhelming Russians today (mk.ru/social/2016/05/22/nevynosimaya-legkost-vyrozhdeniya.html),
and a commentary on the Russkaya narodnya liniya site today offers an even more
disturbing observation.

If that approach is adopted, the
number of Russians who will say they are Orthodox almost certainly will rise;
but the number of them who will actually become believers may in fact decline
as it becomes obvious that Orthodoxy is a political category rather than a
religious one, something a Russian must declare to fit in rather than a faith
he or she can live by.